What Moves the Sea
by Missez Ventimiglia
Summary: “He’s young and beautiful and obscenely rich why wouldn’t he feel immortal?” A series of vignettes set after 6x20. Written for the Rory Ficathon 06. RoryLogan. Complete.


What Moves the Sea

Disclaimer: If I owned Gilmore Girls, it would likely evolve into the Rory and Logan Show, which might not be the best idea.

Summary: "He's young and beautiful and obscenely rich; why wouldn't he feel immortal?" A series of vignettes set after 6x20. RoryLogan. Complete.

A/N: Written for the Rory ficathon '06 for Kristen. Prompt is at the end. The lines Rory quotes are from Virginia Woolf's _To the Lighthouse_ and the last line of the story is from Anne Michaels' exceptional book _Fugitive Pieces_. Italics indicate flashbacks.

--

Rory closes the wooden door of his hospital room, holding onto the knob so as to minimize the slight 'click'. He's sleeping, eyelashes dark against mottled cheeks, bruised and battered. She sits down in the chair next to his bed, setting her bag of readings for school down on the floor. Rory opens one of her heavy tomes, flipping to chapter 15 of her book on Latin American relations with the United States. Five minutes later, she is re-reading the same paragraph for the tenth time, and she gives up, closing the book and looking at Logan. She leans forward, her hair brushing his chest, to place her index and middle fingers on the side of his neck, searching for his pulse. It's there, steady and insistent, and she relaxes a little, laying her face on his chest so that she can feel its rise and fall. It's an awkward position and her back usually hurts if she stays in it too long, but she needs this reassurance that he's alive and well, that he's healing.

Her fingers move feather-light across his face, over the bruises and discolorations, and pause right above his eyebrow to trace the long thin scar that rests there, a permanent reminder that you should never dive into the shallow end of a swimming pool, even if that means your best friends will make clucking noises at you for a month. Rory asked him about the scar once, and Logan's hand had gone reflexively to the place that bore it. He had explained, sounding surprised, a little, that she had noticed, but by then she had committed the planes of his face to her memory and it was his face she saw when she closed her eyes at night.

He is young and beautiful and obscenely rich; is it any wonder he felt immortal? She is all too aware of his mortality now, and she doesn't appreciate the reminder that life can hurt her in such a way that she will not ever be able to even the score. Lines from a book read long ago come back to her, and she shapes the words silently, under her breath, "_Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?" _It's a bad idea to think of jumping now, because her mind hears a thud from far away, sees a broken body in a sea of green, remembers the feeling that had gripped her when Colin called, as if she was about to lose something unbearably precious. Rory shakes her head (once, twice); as if by doing so she could rid herself of the image, fold it away into one of the dark crevices of her mind and ignore it. Despite her best efforts, her shoulders shake and the tears slip silently down her cheeks, blurring her vision, until she blindly wipes them away.

(When Logan stirs, protesting that she should go home and rest, that the plastic hospital chair can't possibly be comfortable, Rory's eyes are clear and her face freshly scrubbed, and when he kisses her, he can't taste the saline.)

--

"_How much farther?" he asks, his breath escaping in puffs of white air, as he walks a few steps behind her._

"_You sound like you're five."_

"_I believe _you're _the one embracing your inner child today, Ace. You're also the one not carrying a heavy sled uphill."_

"_You make it sound like I forced you to do this," Rory says, laugher evident in her voice. "You were the one who was so sure you didn't snore. You shouldn't make bets you can't win." She picks up her pace, feet sinking into the thick, wet snow. "I think this is the one", she calls down to him. _

"_Funny, you said the same thing three hills ago", he mutters, switching the reins of Rory's old wooden sled to his other hand. Finally, _finally, _he reaches the top and Rory is standing, waiting impatiently for him so that they can go down the hill again. They go on the sled together, flying over bumps and defying gravity for fractions of a second, over and over, in different positions. The snow is perfect for making snowballs and they take advantage of it, until they are soaking wet, and exhausted, fall onto the ground. _

"_We have to take the sled back", she tells him, and he groans. "It's my mom's favourite sled; it's like an heirloom!" They get up and walk a little uphill toward the sled, fifty feet away, and when they're almost there, Rory stops and places her palms flat against his chest, cheeks flushed from exertion. Then she pushes and Logan's on his back, again, and her laughter drifts down to him as she runs uphill with more energy than he knew she possessed. He chases after her, aware that she is quite possibly insane and that sometimes he is overwhelmed with love for her. He overtakes her fairly easily, and Rory sees something in his eyes that makes her breath catch in her throat and then he's on top of her, pinning her down and he tastes like pine and _Logan_, so she closes her eyes and lets the world spin away. _

_--_

She comes up to him after the ceremony, once the various members of the Huntzberger clan have started milling about and socializing, one hand behind her back and he catches a glimpse of gold ribbon and brightly patterned wrapping paper.

"Please", Logan says, "tell me that's an extra-large bottle of Tylenol."

"Guess again", she replies, handing him the package. Opening it, he finds a framed photo of the two of them, taken at the _Daily News_ office: a snapshot of their day-to-day life. He hugs her, breathing in the light perfume she wears, and he wishes for the hundredth time that London was only a couple hours away.

"I'm proud of you", she says, and her words reverberate through him, embedding themselves in his skin.

"The few hundred pictures you took suggest otherwise."

Rory swats his hand, and continues. "You graduated from Yale alive." Her eyes are shining with certainty and she is leaning forward to emphasize her point. "And without liver disease", she adds as an afterthought.

"You know what they say: the best laid plans of mice and men…"

He's hot and uncomfortable in his suit, he has to go spend an interminable amount of time with his father in five minutes and his body feels like an eighty-year-old stuntman's. Still, her body naturally leans into his, he's just graduated from _Yale_, and long-distance relationships have worked before, he knows, so when she asks someone to take their picture his smile is wide and genuine.

--

_She's shivering, cold even with three blankets piled on top of the bed and the heat in Logan's – their – apartment cranked up high. She's rarely sick, which is a good thing, because it frustrates her, feeling weak and unable to do as much as she normally would. She has articles to review and papers due soon, and instead of being productive, she's stuck lying in bed with a box of tissues on one side of her and a stack of magazines and DVDs on the other. _

"_Hey", Logan says, placing a cool hand on her forehead. "You're still pretty warm." He sets a bowl of chicken noodle soup on the night table._

"_Did you make this?" Rory asks, and when he nods, she smiles. "Is it safe to eat?"_

"_Much safer than it would be if you made it."_

_She accepts the spoon he hands her, and sniffs. "I'm learning how to cook now, remember? I don't burn toast anymore."_

"_You should put that on your résumé" he says, smirking at the face she makes at him in response. Logan makes himself comfortable on the bed, despite her protests that she's contagious, and they settle in, the silence punctuated by Rory's periodic coughing fits. An hour later, it looks like Rory is asleep and Logan moves to get up to call Colin and Finn and let them know he won't be able to join them for their regular Sunday afternoon game of pool. Slowly, he eases himself off the bed, but her hand shoots out and grabs his wrist and he looks back at her, sleepy-eyed and with cheeks creased from pillows. _

"_Don't leave me."_

"_I won't," he promises. "I'll be right back."_

_--_

She sleeps in his shirt. It smells like him, a mixture of Armani Black Code and soap, and sometimes, when she's on the verge of waking up, she forgets that he's not there.

She doesn't mope – she's not that girl (and besides, they're still together, so what would she mope about?). Her life continues, and she makes some new friends – she hadn't realized before that many of her friends were Logan's and had graduated with him – and she enjoys her senior year of college and editing the paper. She goes home to see her mother, to help her pick up the pieces and reach some sort of version of okay, and her heart fills when Lorelai's laugh is no longer brittle.

Rory keeps a calendar and at the end of each day, she places a big 'X' through another square, one less day until she sees Logan again. Sometimes his name spills from her lips and hangs in the silent air of their apartment and sometimes the ocean between them seems incredibly vast, fraught with misunderstandings and loneliness. At first, he doesn't like it, the responsibility, and Rory worries, because she doesn't want to be Penelope to his Odysseus, the one who waits as he keeps searching for another adventure. Then one day, the excitement in his voice carries over the miles of transatlantic cable as he tells her about working on the layout and the articles he wrote about the military coup in Thailand and she knows that he loves it, that it satisfies him, and she exhales.

On a day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, he calls and she forgets about their fight last week, because hearing his voice makes everything a little better, a little easier. They laugh and banter and they will be okay, she knows, because they have to be, because the thought of no longer having Logan in her life is something she can't contemplate without needing to sit down. They say goodbye and when she hangs up, she marks another X on her calendar – seventeen more days – and returns to her reading.

_It's longing that moves the sea._

--

Story prompt: What is your passion when life is unsettled? Where do you go when life is unturned? What do you do when faced with the knowledge?  
How do you start when you feel so unheard?

Include: Rory/Logan background with lots of history

Don't include: fights in the present


End file.
